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The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has a long history of mismanagement. Last year, the public became aware of a wait-time scandal at the VA hospital in Phoenix. Veterans were forced to wait months for appointments, even as the hospital was reporting no delays in service and allowing its management to receive performance bonuses. Over 1,700 veterans were not placed on the official wait lists to hide the length of actual waits. The VA Inspector General suggested that the Phoenix VA was not the only center to modify its wait lists in this fashion.

In “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” economist F.A. Hayek described how markets take into account an array of local knowledge that governments do not possess. It is “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place,” which enters into everyday exchanges, but central authorities cannot access it. That’s because it “never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” This sort of knowledge is tacit and subjective, so “by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form.”

ObamaCare gives states the option to expand Medicaid to cover all individuals below 138 percent of the federal poverty level, which is approximately $33,500 a year for a family of four. To encourage states to expand, the federal government agreed to fund 100 percent of expenditures for the newly-eligible participants until 2016, and then slowly decrease the match to 90 percent in 2020 and into the future.

In recent decades, the Democratic Party has moved far to the left on economic policy. I have discussed the leftward shift on tax policy, which was illustrated once again by President Obama’s generally awful proposals in his new budge

The Department of Energy (DOE) is admitting that it failed. Last week, it announced that it will stop development of FutureGen 2.0, a federally-financed, coal-fired power plant in Illinois. FutureGen, and its successor FutureGen 2.0, wasted millions of tax dollars, and was beset with multiple delays and cost overruns.

President Obama’s budget would raise taxes to fund a $478 billion infrastructure spending plan for highways, transit, and other items. The budget (on page 26) cites an International Monetary Fund study that “highlights the importance of choosing high-efficiency infrastructure projects based on rigorous benefit-cost analysis.”